Joseph Hunt's Blog, page 12

TV: Grimm!

[image error]

A couple of months ago quite a few people recommended the TV show Grimm to me... I wasn't sold on it at first, but out of nowhere, yesterday I started to watch it, and now I just can't stop thinking of what a great programme it is!




So my initial thoughts on this show where that it's going to be a rip off of Supernatural. BUT it's not. Grimm has its own greatness because it's based on the Grimm fairy tales... which is great just in itself.




I'm only up to the 5th episode, so I have a lot more episodes to go. There are so many different things going on in this show... but it's all really really good. There's a "Big Bad Wolf" who isn't that big or bad, and in fact, he's pretty helpful. There are a lot of other fairytale-esque characters in this, but they're not as regular... although I wouldn't know which characters are regular as I'm only the fifth episode in.




I know that I'm really far behind, and if you've been watching the TV show then you'll know what happens... so that means no spoilers here! I know that something epic and amazing will happen in the end... I can feel everything building up to it... and I really want to know what it is!




If you saw my post on how I hate endings you'll know that deep down I don't want this to end. HA!




Have you been watching Grimm?

What are your thoughts, bearing in mind I'm only 5 eps in! 




-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.

Coffee, Coca Cola and Chocolate Chip Cookies! :D

My Sunday mornings are fun. Well, they consist of being caffeine induced, enough so not to go crazy, but enough to be productive. I have my chocolate, my coffee, my Coca Cola, and even my hot chocolate (chocolate brownie flavour) it's so so nice! That's my Sunday morning, in fact, that's each and every morning now that university is over for summer... maybe without the chocolate chip cookies, they're just reserved for special mornings, mornings where an extra pick-me-up is needed.



I'm busy trying to get my blog back up from the ruins in which I left it, and I'm trying to post more to my Facebook page and be the guy I was a month ago when I was all over the face of the social media... that means, Twitter, FB page, and this blog have to be getting the traffic and responses they were a while ago.



I am still coffee induced and I have a lot of stuff to do. Well, if watching Grimm, a TV programme, that I've got a new found love for counts as having a lot of stuff to do. I also have edits and writing to do for today, so I'm obviously going to get that out of the way first, and then I shall watch some TV... I don't want to go wasting all this energy I've got brewing inside.




What are you doing with your Sunday?

Drinking plenty cups of coffee?


-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.

I hate ENDINGS!

May is the month of endings... so much is coming to an end, and I don't like it... not one little bit. I hate reading the end of a book, and I hate writing the end of a book. But I'm not going to be talking about books, I'm talking about TV!




This is my current TV list... and it's all ending!





The Vampire Diaries 

(10th May) BUT New Season!

The Secret Circle 

(10th May) the end :'(


Desperate Housewives 

(13th May) the end :'(

Supernatural 

(18th May) BUT New Season!

Nikita

(18th May) BUT New Season!




I don't have a TV list any more... as you can see, everything has ended, and I'll say it again. I don't like it... not one little bit. I hate change, and how all of this is just going to disappear (however, it will be back in September/October time BUT THAT'S STILL TOO LONG).



I didn't cry the first time I watched the ending of Desperate Housewives, and that's only because I watched it with a friend, but when I watched it a second time around, I sobbed like a little baby, and to top that off I then watched Supernatural, and I had so many feelings about that as well... thank goodness there's another season of that or I'd be boarding a plane to America and hunting whoever cancelled it.



I've never really thought about it, but I'd love to go into TV script writing, it would be a lot of fun, especially if I got to work on a show like The Vampire Diaries or Supernatural, or even Nikita! I'd just love to be a part of that process!



So yes, I hate endings... in fact, I'm at the end of Lumen (doing a bit of a polish) and I don't want to finish it, I just want to say, no, it doesn't end there, there's still more, and although you'll get to see more in Noctem (sequel to Lumen) I just want to keep on adding... I've had to take a bit of time away to clear my head because I'll end up going crazy if I keep thinking about all the things I want to add. And with this head clearing time I've picked up The Salem Gates again and WHOAA, MY FRIENDS, CAN I TELL YOU YOU'RE IN FOR A BLOODY TREAT! Or would that be big headed? Ah well, I don't care!




Have you been watching any of those shows?

Are you sad to see them leave your screens?



-Joseph

(Disclaimer: Joe is not crazy, and his ranty blog posts should not reflect his creative writing. Thank you, and good day! Hehe)


Comment. Follow. Share.

Fifty-Five Word Friday!

The other day I saw something and it looked really fun. It was writing a story in 55 words, no more and no less, 55 words exactly. That might actually not seem so fun considering you have to get 55 words exactly... but what the hell, and why the hell not. THIS COULD BE FUN!







Mine

Jack
coddled a hand to his chest. He rubbed his chin against the fingers and kissed
the knuckles. He smiled, and turned to see who the hand belonged to. It didn’t
have a body, or an arm. It bled out over his chest. He whacked the hand away
and sat up.

The hand was his.





Don't Be Rude



“Hey,
I’m home now,” she said.

            There was no response, so she
shrugged, and got on with life, dancing around with her earphones in, playing
some loud music. She turned around and a knife broke through her chest to her
heart, it killed her instantly.

            Nobody ever said “hey” to death
before. It scared him.




Those were my first 2 attempts at writing 55 word fiction, and I had fun writing them. So how about you write some... even make a blog post, include your links here!




What did you think of them?


-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.

Let's Resume Scheduled Programming!

As you might already know, I've taken a little bit of time out of writing and editing, and it's been killing me. However, I took the time out for a good reason, and now that I can no longer use that reason because university is over, I WANT TO GET BACK TO WRITING AND EDITING! Before I left you guys Lumen was almost finished, and it hasn't been touched since, and now, I'm going to give it that final polish, I'm going to make it shine, and I'm going to try my absolute hardest to get it up and online for you guys... and being so patient with me, even after all of those teasers!



So this is me saying that I'm officially back in writer mode! I'm not going to let anything or anyone get in my way now... I've waited too long, and had too many obstacles to pass to get this far... and there's not a chance that I'm not going to get what I want from it.

Lumen is close to being released. It's just going through the polishing phase.




The Salem Gates has about 18,000 words of it written.




Clandestine has about 6,000 words written.

So welcome back to me posting daily! And also I'll be taking part in a blog tour, so look out for those posts as well... I'm very excited for that!




If you read this, I'd love it if you could leave a comment... just so I know you're still out there listening to me go on and on about writing, and my writing etc.





Anyway, have a GREAT day!


-Joseph


Comment. Follow. Share.

Blog Tours: Embrace Them!

This summer I'm going to be participating in a blog tour! And in this blog tour there are going to be 50 or so blogs involved, and I'm happy to say that I'm going to be one of those blogs! YAY! However... there are a few people who are nervous and anxious about this... but there's nothing to be worried about!









Blog tours are an amazing experience! And of course you're going to be anxious and nervous at first, you're going to be worried whether your posts are good enough, or whether your blog is good enough. And for this blog tour, it's running for 16 weeks, from the 27th May to 8th September... so a long time!



If you ever get the change to be involved in a blog tour... TAKE IT! If you're in doubt about doing a blog tour, here are all of the good things! You get to speak to a different audience, and this means directing them over to your blog and getting more readers... so if you're directing people to your blog then you're bound to see a bump in your traffic, and maybe even in your follower count. You'd be silly to say "no".




Joe's Top Tips to Blog Tours!


Prepare!

Make sure that you have the people who are going to be blogging on your blog... and make sure you schedule them because you don't want to be floundering around all over the place. Also, make sure that your post is written and sent to the person who is hosting you, that way you know that your post will be going up and won't have to worry (as much).



Use your networks!

So your post is up. Now you need to tell people about it! Use your networks, go and tell Facebook, go and tell Twitter, heck, even tell your blog about how you're feeling about being part of a blog tour!



Establish a Connection!

If someone comments on your post, remember to reply to them, this means that you'll have to go to your guest post to see if anyone has commented. And don't forget to say thanks, for both reading your post and commenting... if you do both, there's a higher chance they'll go to your blog.



-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.

You Win: Beautiful Blogger Award

You've Been Awarded!






I feel like I've been disappointing people as I haven't been posting in a while, and when I saw that I was being awarded the Beautiful Blogger Award, and the reason was because I was a "prolific poster" and I hadn't posted in over 2 week! 




Anyway, on with the Beautiful Blogger Award! I was awarded this by Anne Chaconas, and on her blog it has the rules, so let's go through them, to see what I have to do!




When you're awarded a Beautiful Blogger Award, you need to list seven random facts about yourself, and post a link to the blog of the person who nominated you (which I have done above. YAY!), then you have to link to seven other bloggers who you believe are deserving of the award, and then let those bloggers know that you've nominated them.




Now that that's out of the way, shall we begin?





Seven Random Facts



1 - I have recently started watching RuPaul's drag race... and you could say that I'm a little bit obsessed... although not because I want to dress up as a woman. I just like it because it's good TV! Which leads me on to my 2 - I absolutely LOVE television! Like, I am a TV freak... I will watch anything and most of the time I will love it and become obsessed, willing to download each and every episode of it until I've watched them all... some say it's a problem, the only problem is not finding all the episodes! Ha!




3 - I cannot dance. I like to think that I can dance, and on a Friday or Saturday night when I go out drinking, I sometimes (often) get drunk and start dancing. I know I can't dance... but I enjoy doing it! So why not ;D




4 - I make weird faces when I lipsync to songs... I know this because when I'm in my friend's car I record us and I'm the one making the weird faces when singing along to the songs. And no, I will not upload any of the videos... I also realised through it, that I hate my voice... it's probably my worst feature! Ha!




5 - When things get too tough, I shut down... and uni work has been tough. I also put things off, I never face my problems head on, I'm a wimp in that respect. The first thing that went this time was my blog, and I haven't posted anything in 2 weeks, it was also my whole networking life.




6 - I want a tattoo on chest; 3 nautical stars, the middle star will be bigger than the other two and in the middle star there will be the 'II' gemini symbol but looking really fancy. I want it that much, that I don't want it yet because I fear that it won't look good enough.




7 - I fall for people too quickly and too easily.



Seven Bloggers!
I don't have reasons for why I've selected these people, other than they are all amazing people who I wish the very best to with their writing, and have been nothing but supportive!


Theresa Stoddard


Rue Volley

Dominique Weldon

Mera Sampson @ Mera's YA Booklist

Samantha Combs

Kymberlee Burks Miller

Karly Kirkpatrick


I've never met any of these people in person before, and that's what I love about blogging and people who blog, you can speak to so many people, more people than you could in a previous lifetime... these are the seven bloggers that I award with the Beautiful Blogger Award!




I think this is a great way of me getting back into blogging... so be expecting more posts from me!




-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.

A Rant About April!

Try as I may... April was just not my month... in fact, I've decided that April should claim the title "Month of Neglect" because that's what I feel like I've done... I feel like I've neglected everything that I love, and everything that I want to get out of life.



The last two weeks of April have been very hectic, and I don't really know why, they shouldn't have been, but everything just collapsed and all of my plans fell through. I had, in fact, I still do have all the blog posts planned for the past 8 or 9 days, and I feel like absolute shit because I haven't blogged everyday... in fact, this is the 20th post of April, so I suppose it's not that bad. I am going to be posting whenever I can from now on --- I am not someone who works with a deadline, once something has to be done within a time frame I break out in rashes (well, I don't, but I need an excuse).



Everything was going well, right up until the 16th of April; the day I received my Student Finance, also the week when I got my iPhone. And then the week after I had to start working on my 2 creative writing portfolios, an English essay and a reassessment portfolio! All of which I could have already started, but I have poor time management skills.



I know what my problem is... I just need to work on it.



I can guarantee that the end of May will be so much better... I won't have any university work to do! IT WILL BE JOE-TIME, ALL OF THE TIME!



Also, my email account was hacked this month and there was a lot of spam sent from my account, so if you got anything from me with a weird link... I'm sorry!

I'll end this post with my statistics for April... also, thanks for visiting my page! I hit 10,000 for this month!



Facebook: 1,590 (+35)

Twitter: 1,717 (+76)

Blogger: 253 (+14) with 33,358 hits (+10,295)

Scribd: 214 (+8) with 11,166 reads




Facebook| Joseph's Writing

Twitter| @Joe_Eastwood

Scribd| Joseph Eastwood

Goodreads| Joseph Eastwood



How was April for you?

What do you have planned for May?

-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.

Please Don´t Say ‘Please’: Guest Post by Per Holbo

This week's guest post comes from Per Holbo, a Danish writer. And he's here to talk about his culture, and how the word "please" just doesn't exist in their language.



On with the post:




Mishaps due to cultural differences


Imagine sitting with your family for Sunday dinner and one of your guests suddenly says: ‘could you pass me the salt?’




Wouldn´t it strike you as a bit rude? Wouldn´t all of you think what your mother would say out loud? You know, ‘say the magic word!’



Well, if you ever have a Scandinavian visitor, this might just be what you could experience, because in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish ‘please’ simply doesn't exist!



Whenever different cultures meet, there´s bound to be issues of differing understanding. We can say the exact same thing, but we mean it completely different. We can do something in one culture to be polite, but if we do it in another culture it´s considered very impolite.



One of the most difficult things for me as a Dane is how to be polite when I ask for something and the reason is the above mentioned: ‘Please’ does not exist in Danish. We simply do not have a word for it and it strikes us a very odd thing indeed, that you can say the most appalling things in English, as long as your sentences end with ‘please.’ (yeah, I know, it´s taking this a bit too far, but I think you get the idea.) In Danish, saying ‘pass the salt’ would be considered a command and the very idea that a single word in the end of it could be enough to soften it? Hmm... no...



But since we don´t have the word ‘please’ in our language we need other ways to be polite. We do this by softening the command structured sentence into something where the recipient has a choice. A phrase like ‘pass me the salt’ then becomes something like ‘could you pass me the salt’ or ‘would you pass me the salt?’ See, how the command is changed into a polite question?



When people who´s first language does contain ‘please’ (such as the German ‘bitte’) ask for a translation, Danes would often try to give them one, but since it doesn´t exist, we may try to translate the word to a few words that means just about the same as ‘please.’ For instance, it could be translated to ‘hvis du vil være så venlig’ (in English: ‘if you would be so kind’) but as you can probably see, this doesn´t do ‘please’ justice. Using such a translation is nothing more than interpreting the word ‘please’ as we Danes understand it. And obviously we´ve got it all wrong. ‘Please’ doesn´t mean ‘if you would be so kind’ but much rather means something like ‘then I would be pleased.’



This is where things can really go wrong. All English speaking people I´ve met, that being Americans, British, Canadian or others, have always made an effort to be as polite as they can be. Thus coming to Scandinavia they´ve all tried to somehow implement the suggestions we stupid Danes have given them. Let me tell you: this is a mistake.



Why? Well, that´s complicated, so this is the point where you really need to hold tight. The Danish are what you might call an unimpressed people. We don´t put too much in traditions and form (or so we like to think... the truth is somewhat different, but maybe I´ll get back to that in another post, if Joseph will let me...?) Danes are also a people of mediocrity. We take pride in being equal (hence our welfare state or ‘flexicurity’ as economics like to call our economic system) and any attempt to set yourself aside as being either posh or poor, high or low, or in any other way try to exalt or lower yourself is not being looked well upon. This means that being polite is good, but you shouldn´t overdo it.



Therefore, if someone were to exaggerate the politeness, there could only be one of two reasons: either that person is a ‘brown nose’ and obviously we don’t care much for those or that person is using a Danish specialty when it comes to language: the ironic exaggeration. Overdoing politeness, what you really mean is the very opposite of being polite. ‘Shut the door, if you would be so kind’ really means ‘I´ve told you a thousand times! Now, shut that door already!’



So, here is a suggestion when learning to speak Danish and wanting to be polite: keep it simple and just ask if people would do this or that and even if you get it wrong, they will forgive you. But please don´t try to say ‘please’ in Danish. It doesn´t exist...



Great post!




If you want to hear more from Per, then here are his links!


Blog

Amazon

Smashwords




Also, I'm looking for more people to guest blog... probably for next Friday, so email me at josepheastwood@ymail.com if you're interested!




-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.

Editing: Be Blunt, Be Brutal!

Quick note: I was editing posts from my phone and scheduling them because I knew that the week would be busy... it turns out that I deleted each post... but I'm going to write them all out again, to the best of my knowledge.

This post is one in a bunch of posts I'm going to be doing on editing, there's no schedule, but they'll just be going up whenever I have free post slots.


Be Blunt, Be Brutal! 

There is no space for wimpish behaviour in editing... not for me, not for you, and certainly not for you readers! They don't want a poorly edited book on their Kindle... so cut the crap, and start editing properly.


Joe's top tip: if in doubt, then cut it out! 

The best way to spot an error is to read you work aloud, and if you're getting tongue tied doing that, then you know you've got some editing to do.

I've found that as I write I like to describe a lot... and that isn't the aim of the game... the aim is to tell a story and give the reader somewhere to escape to, they don’t want to work, they want to be sucked into a book… and let’s face it, that’s why Twilight worked… it wasn’t well written, but a lot of people escaped into her world.

I compiled a list of words in a previous post, and I really believe that cutting some of the those words will actually make your writing so much better. So be blunt with those words, and be very brutal, that's the only way you can overcome the dreaded monster inside that wants to protect your baby.



I thought the picture of Jack Nicholson from The Shining was very fitting with this post, although not like trying to get an axe through a door, writing is much easier, or at first it might seem like trying to get an axe through a door, editing does get easier.





Joe's top tip: leave it to the end, don't get sidetracked by a different state of mind.




Your writing mind and your editing mind are two different states. The creative side, the writing, is your muse, and the editing side is fixed and focused on cutting out dead words, redundancies, run-on sentences etc. and if you're continuously switching between the two you'll most likely fall prey to The Block.




So don't start editing until you've finished, and don't edit like a wimp... edit with a fury in your eyes and the need in your loins, the need to make your manuscript better.


SO START CHOPPING MY FRIENDS. 




Are you a brutal editor?

Don't you just love editing a finished piece?




-Joseph 


Comment. Follow. Share.